Conventional mail order retailing usually uses a procedure where a printed catalog is produced and delivered to provide members with product information, with the users then ordering their desired products by telephone. For a large mail order retailer, there is a large amount of product information, so that it is common for such printed catalogs to be as thick and as heavy as a normal magazine. Further, because the product information is usually updated little by little, it is necessary for a new printed catalog to be produced and delivered at certain intervals. However, the production and delivery of such catalogs incur a similar cost to the publishing of a normal magazine.
For this reason, some mail order retailers have tried to have the production and delivery costs of printed catalogs borne by consumers by making users pay for the printed catalogs. However, making users pay for printed catalogs has a high probability of discouraging potential customers, so that there is the risk of limiting the market for the products.
There is also the problem that while short, it takes some time between the production of the catalogs and their delivery. In today's consumer society, companies need to quickly provide consumers with products (and/or services) that appropriately reflect the tastes of consumers, so that the time taken from the release of products to the delivery of catalogs to consumers prevents companies from properly satisfying this need.
It should be obvious that such time-related problems could be solved if it were possible to deliver a content, such as a catalog, on demand using broadband communication where a large amount of audio and image data can be transmitted at high speed, but the establishment of such communications infrastructure is expected to take a long time. Even if such infrastructure were to be established, it would still take longer for the delivery costs to fall.
The present invention was conceived in view of the situation described above, and has an object of providing a content providing method that can provide content quickly and at low cost, as well as content providing facility and user equipment for realizing the present method